LEARN A SKILL IN 20 HOURS

How do you have a good amount of knowledge in 20 hours?

Taken from the Video: How to learn a skill in 20 hours? @psychologyunleashed

Did you stop learning at some point in your life?

Did you find that at the age of 15 it seemed to be a year or two to master a new foreign language and now you see it as an unattainable goal or a task that will take at least a decade?

When I moved to Poland, I started learning Polish as my second language next to English. I was 28 years old and convinced that Polish was not only the right choice, but it would only take me a year or so to learn it. I was surprised that a foreign language came into my head so slowly and clumsily that considered giving up, convinced that it was the end of my career with Polish. However, there was a time I would have been able to master this kind of knowledge in a year or two. What has changed?

The weaker mind? Lack of language skills? A bad teacher? No motivation?

I might agree with the last thing a little — you have to be determined to get to know any skill or to assimilate a given knowledge, otherwise you will say ”Do widzenia.”

How do the best do it? Is there any superhuman talent required to master complex knowledge? Well, no! And I know it from my own experience.

I’ve gathered 5 key things you should do to join the group of people who learn very quickly:

Step number one. Warm up your brain.

The brain and our cognitive abilities are like a muscle — unused the knowledge may fade away.

A person who solves a lot of crossword puzzles will associate certain facts perfectly, a person who practices for quiz shows will guess the Beatles after a couple of notes, and so on. People who practice their minds not only remember a lot from the fields they practice, but they learn to recognize certain patterns, and these help in deduction and improvisation. Therefore, in order to possess quick learning skills, you must be in a conscious learning zone. It can’t be a coincidence that one Friday afternoon you watched this animation, grabbed a book — and boom. A collision route with knowledge. A trained mind is one that exercises every day, learns new words, new terms, exposes itself to conversations, e.g. here below in the comments, reads about new phenomena, challenges itself. Only if we are conscious of the learning process, further points will make sense.

Number two. Set a main goal and side goals.

It is important to break down skill or knowledge into actionable steps.

You can’t just write “I want to learn Polish at B1 level”. It’s naive and wishful. However, when you decide “I want to learn enough Polish to take part in a facebook discussion under a specific article” — this is a goal with practical sense — it is real, measurable and easy to break.
Let’s break it down further: in order to participate in the discussion you need to find an article, find a specific fanpage where the discussion takes place, read and understand the article, formulate your own conclusions, write them, and when someone answers, answer them. There are a lot of specific goals and side steps in order to achieve the whole task.

What are the main components of your skill?

Each skill has a set of activities in which you can practice.

In case of playing the guitar it will be finger efficiency, sense of rhythm, knowledge of chords, songs, and reading tabs. In the case of learning Polish we have an accent, understanding single words, whole sentences, understanding the context, etc. From the whole list select only those that are absolutely necessary for the purpose we have set ourselves. In this case we will not need an accent, we will write, we want to know the basic vocabulary, the vocabulary used in the article and the basic grammatical forms.

Once we’ve broken down these basic mini-skills — let’s learn each one individually — we’ll spend a lot of time analyzing the vocabulary and understanding the context of the article. Let’s try to formulate our first statements on the subject, etc. In a nutshell, let’s focus on achieving all the goals. Don’t buy textbooks and school exercises. We have a narrow goal — we will achieve it. In the case of learning to play the guitar, if our goal would be to play only one particular song — let’s narrow down to one rhythm, one set of chords and strikes. You should avoid potential traps during the planning process.
— You can choose a too ambitious goal
— Or you can break down a skill into too many elements. You will get stuck because there’ll be too many things to learn at once. Just learning words from an Polish text is a lot, try to understand them and don’t pay too much attention to its pronunciation. This is not the right phase.

Step number four. Eliminate the barriers.

It’s a difficult point to achieve, because the main barrier will be our ability to long-term focus on one task. If we want to learn something in two days, let’s give ourselves two full days for it. This means, for example, devoting a complete Saturday-Sunday weekend to just one thing. Thanks to the internet, our little Polish adventure will be rather easy. Don’t forget about dictionaries and translators, just like when we try to play the guitar. It will be much more difficult if we try to learn a skill that requires manual involvement, such as flipping a coin or learning the basics of pottery. Remember about point number one, without warming up it will be hard to complete your plans. If I add a Polish accent to my goal list, even one month can be not enough to fulfill my aspiration. It is better to give up on some elements.

Number five. Trust the process.

And don’t give up after the 10th attempt. You will see that the human brain is actually so flexible that with the right focus it will give you the opportunity to acquire basic skills in an extremely intuitive way. Invest these 15, 20, 30, 40 hours — in learning. If it does not work out — we lost some time, but you will see that after 10–15 hours you will start making the most progress.

I strongly encourage you to spend these 20 or 30 hours on skills, especially those that require intellect — you will see how quickly to make progress in even the new fields. It doesn’t require superhuman skills — just a calm mind, and trust that I am able to assimilate knowledge, and thanks to experience, adapting it into examples that are understandable and give real value is relatively easy.